Personalized Care & Communication: Salesforce Marketing Cloud for a Healthcare Provider

As times change, older generations are becoming more tech savvy and expect better and more efficient ways of communicating with healthcare providers. A regional Medicare provider in the Northeastern United States was tasked with updating their communication systems to improve customer satisfaction and increase retention. Previously, they solely communicated with their members via paper mail, postcards and multiple attempted phone calls. This approach led to an inability to reach their members, a lack of visibility into success of campaign mailers, early turnover of members due to minimal information in an avenue customers wanted, and overall inefficiencies leading to strained customer experiences.

The organization decided they couldn’t postpone modernizing their methods of customer communication any longer and decided to engage customers through email and SMS via Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

• The organization needed the ability to create audience segments based on pertinent patient information for lifecycle messaging and tailored messaging
• Customer touchpoints needed to be branded and presented to the customer in their preferred language (English, Spanish or Chinese)
• Goal to implement system and launch five new multi-channel, multi-lingual automated campaigns utilizing a custom preference center for opt-outs.
• Start process of cleaning up data and put processes in place to ensure cleaner data in the future

The MRE team designed and implemented a Salesforce Marketing Cloud solution that enabled multi-channel, multi-language communications with Health Plan members. Marketing Cloud was integrated directly with Salesforce Health Cloud via the Marketing Cloud connector as well as additional internal systems via MuleSoft and Snowflake. The organization also decided to integrate with Five9 for SMS texting capabilities. Early involvement with the organization’s Salesforce Health Cloud teams allowed for a strategy to overhaul existing outdated customer data, to create guardrails for inaccurate information, and to plan for future campaigns of gathering customer contact information in a seamless manner.  The MRE team also implemented a custom preference center translated into different languages.

Unfortunately, accurate customer data was a challenge. Only 60% of customer records had a valid email or mobile phone for the audience targeted for messaging, and an even smaller percentage of customers had both. Multiple working sessions were conducted to identify strategic efficiencies. Together, they built a strong foundational process to gather and continue cleansing member contact information.

The MRE team worked with the client’s Salesforce Health Cloud team to adjust data processes to track validated data. Customized journeys were created to reach members via the channel(s) available for that customer. For example, if email was not available or opted-out, an SMS would be sent; if SMS was not available or opted-out, an email would be sent; or in best case scenario, both email and SMS would be sent.

These combined efforts allowed the organization to communicate with their members via multi-channel messaging, analyze engagement data, and monitor the communications to better serve their members.